f13.net

I know Haemish hated Avengers Disassembled.  Believe me, I did too.  I didn't care for the first couple of issues of New Avengers either, with Bendis throwing his pet characters together after the old Avengers disbanded due to a lack of funding (despite all the other superheroes and groups that manage to operate without billions of dollars in funding).  The last couple issues though (3 and 4 to be exact) have actually showed some promise though. 

These aren't great comics by any means but Cap's conversation with Iron Man about starting up a new team at least shows acknowledges the problems surrounding the breakup of the team and suggests that Tony's reasons for not funding the team were more personal than financial.  Cap's speech also does a decent, although slightly forced job of tying in this bunch of heroes just being thrown together to the formation of the original Avengers.  When it comes down to it, Stan and Jack's Avengers all responding to a call from Rick Jones (not to mention finding Cap in a block of ice a few issues later) wasn't exactly a complex plot either.  It like when you're playing a P&P RPG and you don't want to get into an elaborate backstory about why all the characters are together because you just want to jump right into things.

Luke Cage, and Spider-man also start to provide some humor for the book, and although Bendis over-uses a lot of these characters (although I can't honestly say I read any of his other books anyway) he does a least have a much better grasp of them then he did the old Avengers.  Of course there are still a lot of drawback to this book.  The team hasn't completely formed yet (Daredevil and Sentry haven't joined yet, and Wolverine just showed up in the last panel of issue 4), and there is also the X-Men/Avengers crossover "House of M" looming in the future which could end up being an even bigger clusterfuck than Disassembled.

New Avengers isn't going to magically make AD a better story somehow.  Hell, for I know it could start sucking again with issue 5.  Especially since I'm not really into stories that take place in the Savage Land.  The last couple of issues certainly don't justify what Marvel did to the title.  But they aren't bad, and had a little more respect been shown in disbanding the old Avengers, the current series would have been taken a lot better.

I was a Bendis fanboi. I love his Daredevil stuff, and I've loved his old crime noir stuff like Jinx and AKA: Goldfish from back in the day. But goddamn, he fucking SUCKS on the Avengers. Yes, I hated AD, and I'm not too sure I don't hate the New Avengers even more.

I love Spider-Woman, always have thought that was a misused character. She's given a decent story, if they'd ever use her. But Spider-Man totally fucks this book up. His quipping is funny, but forced, and totally out of place. HE is totally out of place, and always has been in a team book. It's just not him. Trying to shoehorn Daredevil into the book will be even worse. I've read through issue 4, and it was ok, until the last panel. At which point, we see why Wolverine is on the fucking cover.

I'm sorry, but there is no possible justification for putting Wolverine in this book. He's become the most over-used character in comics, and badly done as a result of it. The fact that he has to be in every single fucking one of the X-Men books is bad enough, in addition to his own book. But the suspension of disbelief required to place him with the Avengers without the events overlapping the X-Men books is just too much. It smells like whoring.

The team does not mesh. Captain America's portrayal lately, in this book, as well as in the Disassembled Spectacular Spider-Man issues does not ring true. He's suddenly turned from the almost perfect paragon of justice into Super-Patriot with secrets and agendas. I haven't read Cap recently, so I don't know if this is true to what they are doing now or not. But it's bad. And this team does not seem like it has any reason whatsoever to be together, other than marketing and pet writer reasons.

I don't have too much of a problem with Spider-man in a team book.  The guy has teamed up with just about every hero in the Marvel Universe at some point or another.  He's fought a hell of a lot of villains too, from street level guys to Firelord and Juggernaut.  I could see why people would want him on a team and I could see why it would be hard for people to say no to Captain Fucking America.  The main reason I couldn't see Spider-man as an Avenger before because of the $1000 a week paychecks they get.  If arcs like Sins Past is what I'd have to put up with to read his solo stories, I'd take him in a team book any day right now.  Daredevil I'll agree doesn't work.  He's said that having a bunch of other people around like that puts a strain on his senses in a fight.  Especially with Cap around since the super-soldier serum seems to affect Cap's body in a way that Daredevil can "see" him as easily. 

Wolverine is overused.  If I had a choice though I'd drop him from the two crap X-books and put a moratorium on Wolverine minis.  I can only assume that he's on the team because they do want things to overlap with the X-books, hence "House of M".  Cap until recently was a character that Marvel didn't know what they wanted to do with.  His current series is surprisingly good though.  His potrayal in AD didn't ring true, you're right.  He never took control of the situation.  As far as secrets and agendas though, I'm not sure what you're talking about as far as New Avengers goes.

It's early still to be expecting the team to mesh.  I'd say the majoirty of the Avengers teams haven't, largely because they'll just take anybody who happens to come along.  Look at the Masters of Evil's attack on the Avengers mansion.  The Avengers had so many interal problems they practically beat themselves and had to get a lot of outside help to win.  These guys had a founding member quit in the second issue.  Hawkeye and Quicksilver were constantly trying to replace Cap as leader shortly after they joined, and that was just a four man team with Cap leading three reformed villains.

I agree with you about the interpersonal conflicts with the other Avengers team. It was one of their strengths.

That wasn't what I meant by meshing. The character types, the whole feel of the chemistry between them just isn't there. There seems no good reason for these characters to be together. The original Avengers worked with the disparate tendencies of the players because there really wasn't a lot of attention paid to the characters. Nowadays, though, there is a lot more attention paid to motiviations, things outside the team book. A lot more is known about these characters than was in the original. Putting a team together because they all happened to be at the same place at the same time just doesn't work for me. As a unit, they fall flat, because the only interpersonal reactions between them are jokes and such. The dialogue feels forced.

The only motivation that's ever been required for joining the Avengers is just to get superheroes to combine their efforts.  It's always been the most open group in the Marvel universe aside from maybe the Defenders and that's pretty much made up of  third-stringers (aside from when Hulk is on the team).  The average hero isn't getting into the Fantastic Four, is too old for the New Warriors, Power Pack, or the Runaways, needs to be a reformed villain for the Thunderbolts, and has to be a mutant to get onto an X-team.  The Avengers have a long history in the MU and a good reputation and don't have any sort of "theme" the heroes have to fit into.  I can see just about any hero wanting to join up, especially when asked by Cap.

And no, the chemistry isn't there for the whole group yet and unfortunately with the trend of streaching stories out as long as possible these days, we might not even have the whole group together by the end of the first 6-issue arc.  I think the lack of chemistry has a lot more to do with the pacing of the story than anything else.  4 issues in and we're only partway through the setup and we're getting a lot of sub-plots thrown in also.  Bendis hasn't given us much time to actually see the characters interact on a personal level.  What the story is with Sentry won't even  be focused on until the next arc.

Though I do love graphic novels, I can certainly FEEL the stretched pacing of some of these issues made necessary by the "gotta fit 6 issues into a graphic novel" format. It's hurting the stories, in some instances, this being one of them. Sometimes, you only really need 1 issue to tell a story, unless you are just lazy.

It also hurts when you think about how many more panels older comics used to have to tell a story in.  These days, especially in comics like New Avengers, they're trying to do that "cinematic" style with double page spreads and some pages with only three panels on it.  In some cases it helps.  When done well it can convey more than multiple panels of characters talking about what's going on.  A lot of the time it's just gratuitous though and no one wants to spend $3 minimum on something they can read through in 5 minutes.

Fuck Sake, boys, get a room.


 :-P

One of my pet peeves is when new writers come into a book and change things around just so they can explore their own pet characters. That has happened a lot in the recent past and really hurts books. (Take a look at X-Men during the revolving-door writers period) Storylines get brought up a dropped unceremoniously, characters get killed off and resurrected, etc.

It's a fundamental problem of putting the whims of the writer ahead of the book. When all is said and done the writer will leave and the book will still be there. Editors really need to reign that shit in.

The decision to get rid of the old Avengers was already decided before Bendis got the job.  If I remember right, it was actually Mark Millar's idea and was approved by Quesada.  Millar was doing too many other projects to actually write AD so they handed it off to Bendis.

Heh.....  Yah,  very true.  I think it's because there are too many writers who got their start doing extreme/shock controversial stuff who then crossed over into the mainstream.  Sure,  it's entertaining when they hit it,  but when they misfire you're left with a fucked storyline and a characters with a shitload of conflicting and unnessacary baggage. 

I was never a real X books fan when I read comics,  but some of the threads here and the recent spate of comic book movies lead me to check out some of the new stuff.

I swear to God,  same shit different day.  From the books I looked at,  you had Jean Gray becoming the Phoenix (again),  dying (again), being brought back... blah.  Some of the other characters I could've sworn had been killed off a couple dozen times already, too.

I've relagated comics to something I read for when I need to kill 15 or 20 minutes during lunch hour. 

The more I read, the more I'm convinced that for X-Men, there are really only about 4 periods you NEED to read. Chris Claremont from like Uncanny #93- circa 200 or so. That was about the time it all started to go to shit, as he left WAY too many storylines open for way too long. Most of them were never successfully completed. Then from around the late 250's up until the reboot, about #282 or so, because you get some decent stories and the beautiful Jim Lee artwork. Don't read it after they split the books, because there is some GODAWFUL writing in there. Just fucking atrocious once they removed Claremont. Nicezia is a fucking hack, and most of the writers were there for so short a time, continuity was just absolutely buttfucked. Don't read it again until Grant Morrison's run in New X-Men, about #113-152. That's some of the best. Do not read the other book; it had some decent starts, but was essentially the musical chairs of writers and artists. Casey would get a good 5 issues, get yanked for Claremont's shitty 4 issues, who'd get yanked again for Austen (who had good ideas, if a little too much soap opera and without any backing from the other X-Bood writers). It was way too uneven. Then pick up Whedon's in progress Astonishing X-Men run, which is really the best it's been since Morrison's stuff. There are other decent runs in there, but nothing spectacular. The X-Treme X-Men run started good, but meandered in the middle; its best quality was Salvador LaRocca's art work.

The new reboot books beyond Astonishing and New X-Men: Academy X are total shite. Excalibur is one of the worst fucking comic books EVER. It is just painful. Claremont has lost what little talent he had left.

This is the one part I'll disagree with.  Nicieza has actually done some pretty good writing.  I love a lot of his Thunderbolts stuff, and some of his New Warriors stuff wasn't bad either.  The problem with the X-books around his time and afterwards was that the writers didn't have a lot of control over the books.  The artists (Jim Lee in particular), Editors, and the EIC were pretty much plotting out where the X-books were going to go, forcing all the crossovers, aborting sub-plots before they finished because they changed their minds about how they wanted to use particular characters.  There was a lot of behind the scenes shit going on back in those days.  A lot of it has been discussed on Usenet, and a lot of the people who were involved with the books back then have been pretty open about the experience.

All I can say is stay away from the Superhero stuff. Most of it isn't even worth wasting time at lunch hour with.

Check out some of the non-Superhero/indie titles out there. I'm sure you'll find something that'll surprise you.

Meh....  I've browsed most of Preacher, and was fairly unimpressed.  Ennis is the Madonna of comics...   he gets off on shock after shock,  till not much is shocking anymore.

Browsed Constantine.  Meh.  The Ennis run, once more,  gave us alot of bullshit pseudo-intellectual criticism of religion,  all with an air of superiority.  (Alot of it retreaded in Preacher.)

For a real laugh, skim through his Nick Fury graphic novel.  He retreads just about every one of his signatures.  Villain with deviant sexual tastes? Check!  Disfigured henchman with absurd name? Check!  Vicious anti-hero? Check!

Browsed Hellboy after the movie,  and that was interesting.  Different story dynamic,  generally pretty good.

There's Sandman and the Books of Magic,  both great.  But both by Gaiman.  He's probably one of the few modern wierd fiction writers that deserves all the praise heaped on him.  Once you plow through it,  not much left.  (Though now I'm looking for a copy of his Coraline....  read an excerpt and was impressed.)

The Punisher will probably always be a guilty pleasure.  But I grew up in New York State around the time when the crime in the city was making you look over your shoulder for the Four Horsemen.  The twice yearly trips into the City to visit the relations really hammered it home at a tender age. I think it loses alot if you don't have the background.  (I know Haemish hates the guy, but I put alot of to missing out on seeing NYC at it's worst.  Man, just the subway trains were enough... it was like a wall of moving graffiti.)

Did I mention that Magneto seems to die and come back more than any character in comic history?  That and the whole analogy for Mutants as persecuted minority of your choice just gets old,  and doesn't jibe up with the rest of the universe.....

Reading newgroups about comics is depressing. There was a Marvel editor that used to post a lot, one of the things he related was that a lot of the back issues from the Marvel vault have been stolen by various employees. It's not a pretty picture in general.

I have no problem with superhero books, and I find the people that thumb their nose at them are no better than the people who will thumb their nose at anything else. Like anything, the vast majority of it sucks. But sometimes it's pretty damn good.

That's funny.

Busiek, Nicieza, and Gail Simone among others post on Usenet a lot, and I respect them a lot for taking the time to talk to the fans like they do.  JMS on the other hand is a total cocksucker, and Bendis tends to hide on his own message board and while he seems like an ok guy, he really seems to have a problem when it comes to acknowledging any flaws in work.

And there are several good superhero books out there, Runaways being one of the more recent examples.  And need I point out that much of Alan Moore's work including Miricleman, Top Ten, and even Watchmen, involves superheroes.

There is nothing good or bad about superheros vs. anything else. In the end super-hero books are a lot like Sci-Fi settings - they are the setting, not the story.

For example you can take a story like Kraven's Last Hunt and it's the same story without super-powers. Or you can read the dialog during Ann(e?) Nocenti's run on Daredevil and realize it's great dialog, and the guy in the red devil outfit doesn't change that.

Super hero books get into trouble when they devolve into "cool villain of the month" or "super popular crossover character cameo" or "Next issue: SOMEONE DIES!" inanity.

In scif-fi you can draw a distinction between stories that are set in a sci-fi universe and stories that are fixated on the sci-fi aspects. A lot of "hard" science ficition, for example, is about cool technology and science first. But a lot of science fiction is just fiction with a setting that may add a lot if you find it cool and are into that sort of stuff. That's why I don't respect the differentiation between "literary" and "genre" fiction, you can literary stuff in a genre.

I didn't like Nocenti's writing on Daredevil. I felt it took the book in such a completely wrong direction, that it removed a lot of the things that were interesting about Daredevil. It was just so pseudo-intellectual and spiritual, and while Daredevil certainly has aspects of that, I never felt he was right for matching up with Mephisto. It just felt wrong, much like putting Spider-Man against so many mystical beings. It's totally the wrong tone for the book.

I don't like Nicieza because of the stuff he did on the X-Books. His Thunderbolts and New Warriors was ok, but with the former, he was taking off from what Busiek did. When he doesn't have good direction, you get shit like the new X-Force book.

The recent X-Force mini Nicieza was just the scripter on.  He basically had to come up with the dialogue for Rob Liefeld's non-sensical plot.  The plot threads he took from Busiek on Thunderbolts I think took him up to around issue 50 with a lot of his own stuff thrown in.  I liked a lot of the stuff he did at the end of the first series mostly because I like how he developed the characters rather than the actual plots.  In particular I think he could do a great Fixer/Techno solo book.

The thing I like about his books is that he isn't trying to be flashy.  He's not trying to do a cinematic book, or a more "real" kind of superhero story.  He's not ashamed to write traditional superhero books, which is good because I there is still a place for them.  I'm also a little bit biased because he does post on Usenet a lot and as I said, he's a nice guy and I respect the way he talks to the fans.

Anyway it's hard to judge any writer by the work the did in the mid-90's.  I'll always point to  The Life of Reilly (http://newcomicreviews.com/GHM/specials/LifeOfReilly/) as the best in-depth account of how shit was working behind the scenes back then, with a loooooooooong look at the events that created Spider-man's clone saga.  Reading this I can only imagine what it would be like to have a similar account of the goings-on at EA.



Edited to add a whole buncha stuff

I haven't read all her issues, so I honestly don't know what you are talking about.

But, she wrote 257 (DD & Punisher) and the stuff around 272 with Number 9 and that liberal chick was gold. The liberal chick is all feminazi tough bitch and the girl is like "I made you a sandwich, here, you've got to eat to keep those big strong muscles."

Some of the Nocenti stuff on Daredevil was good, such as Typhoid Mary. But there was an entire arc that lasted a good long while where DD left New York, did some kind of on the road thing, and Mephisto was driving it all, fucking with DD's head. It was just a mess.

Just read issue 5 of New Avengers, which is a step down from the last couple of issues.  A lot of clunky dialogue and all that really comes from it is that S.H.I.E.L.D. is once again shown to be involved in some shady activites and in this case seem all too willing to try to kill superheroes and let their own people die in the process just so they can get some vibranium or something.  Of course the opening arc of Astonishing X-men had already shown us S.H.I.E.L.D. involved in some immoral activites recently, but in a way that didn't seem nearly as forced.  And of course Bendis doesn't write Wolverine anywhere near as well as Whedon either.  When Lykos asks Wolverine to tell Cap about the shit the US government has put mutants through with things like the Weapon X program forcing mutants to hunt and kill other mutants Wolvie responds with "Wah Wah.  Boo Hoo." which just really didn't ring true to me for his character.  I don't expect him to side with Lykos, but I'd like to think Wolverine could come up with a slightly better response.

After some promise this book is slipping back down and with House of M rapidly approaching and looking like a piss poor version of Age of Apocalypse Marvel is trying to hype up as "not an alternate reality story" (ok, so it's a Kulan Gath retread instead) with "lasting effects", I don't see this book getting back on track anytime soon.

#5 was even worse. Wolverine's entire presence felt totally forced (Yeah, I just decided to come down to the Savage Land and bring no one with me because we're like a school and stuff). His dialogue was fucking atrocious. Completely out of character, especially the part you mentioned. Most of the other dialogue either was bad or had forced humor, which just gets old after all. It's like he's trying to write everyone as Spider-Man, all quips and things, and none of it feels at all organic.

Bendis writes better than this. Or, when he writes the stuff that fits his style, it's better than this. Avengers doesn't fit his style. And as much as I like Hitch and the colorist, his artwork doesn't fit the tonality of the writing. The book feels like it was written by mathematical formula.

Young Avengers on the other hand has been surprisingly good aside from the fact that I don't think we needed another version of Kang (although looking at upcoming solicits it seems like he'll be gone by the end of the first arc).  Cap and Iron Man make appearances, and Iron Man especially is written a lot better than he is in New Avengers and is given at least somewhat of a better reason for disbanding the Avengers.

Young Avengers is better written, but my biggest problem with it is it just seems like they are copying Young Justice almost exactly, except without the good humor.

It doesn't get much worse than the end of issue #6.  Apparently the justification for bringing a known killer on the Avengers (Wolverine) is because it might come in handy to have someone on the team who will kill, especially with threats like the Scarlet Witch and rogue S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.  Never-mind the fact that in House of M, Wolverine does suggest killing the Scarlet Witch and doesn't exactly get any support from the other New Avengers.

So as far as threats go, we've gone from the Raft breakout (which would require a team effort), to Electro, the Savage Land Mutates, Sauron, and the Second Black Widow and some S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, which all rank right up there with Stilt-man as people I'd consider credible threats requiring the Avengers to take action, let alone for them to consider using lethal force.  Continuing my wordless page count we get three in a row this issue, with the two pages before coming very close and a couple others earlier in a fight sequence.  This being Bendis the other pages are packed with dialogue, explaining the plot to us and telling us why it's such a big deal (which I'm still not clear on).  Someone in S.H.I.E.L.D. is stockpiling vibranium powered weapons as well as super-powered villains generally thought to be dead.  And whoever it is knows the Avengers know.  And it's all very bad and everyone can feel free to back out now and Wolvie might have to kill some people because S.H.I.E.L.D. trained agents and presumably non-cosmic level villains cause past Avenger threats like Korvac, Thanos, or the Kree/Skrull War to pale in comparison.  Fuck, we could very well be seeing the Second Worst Day in Avengers History in the making here.

Maybe Wolverine's going to get his skeleton ripped out again, and this time it'll be replaced with Vibranium?

Wait, what did Vibranium do again?

It wasn't as good as Adamantium, so that would be bad for Logan.

Vibranium absorbed energy/vibrations and amplified it or some shit. I think it'd be a downgrade, especially seeing as what it did to Klaw.

And yes, #6 really was that bad. Iron Man wants Wolverine on the team because he's edgy, or hip, or some such shit. And Cap doesn't like it because Wolvie's a killer, even though Cap's worked with him MANY TIMES, as well as not worrying about his friends being a killer when Nick Fury is involved. It's like the team is deliberately trying to be edgy or something.

I fucking hate this book.

ALEX HAYDEN'S CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN-SCREW-UP JOURNAL OF FUN AND SCORING WITH HOT CHICKS PLUS I LOVE IT WHEN I AIM GOOD

You are ALEX HAYDEN, America's most-beloved assassin and gun-for-hire.  Chicks dig you, men fear you, you can eat a TUB of pudding and not gain an OUNCE.  You don't know who you are or where you came from, and you're not really clear on state capitals, either.

But life is GOOD.  Sure, maybe you're not Wolverine, maybe you're not Spider-Man, maybe Holloywood producers don't answer your calls, maybe your action figure is just a modified Bullseye, maybe you have a variety of offensive and mysterious odors, but still, you don't see Captain America date girls like cowgirl-mere OUTLAW and business partner SANDI, right?  You ask me, maybe the guy could use a little VIBRANIUM somewhere other than his SHIELD, am I right?  Can I get an "amen"?  DYN-O-MITE!  High Five!  Down Low!  Your barn door is open!  Ha ha ha, jokes are funny!

The Vibranium talk reminded me of that.

Oh God.  I'm pissed and I don't even understand that.

I'll wait until the current arc is over before I make any judgements on the Sentry story.  Partly because I don't know where Bendis is going with this, and partly because I don't really care what the deal with the Sentry is.  There some decent action in a fight against the Wrecker that runs through issues 7 and 8 that allows members other than Iron Man or Cap to do something.  In issue 8, we see more of the terrible fucking discussion between Iron Man and Wolverine that gets Wolvie to join the team.

For issue 7 we get another cover with the mystery avenger Ronin on it, who won't show up until the next arc.  Why they feel the need to keep trying to shove this guy down our throats, I don't know.  Bendis has also mentioned that Blade will be showing up at some point in the future, as what I can only imagine is part of their effort to cram every Marvel character with a movie in here somehow.  To that end I guess we should be expecting Man-Thing and Punisher to join the New Avengers soon.  They both need the good publicity they'd get from working alongside Cap and the Avengers.

Young Avengers continues to be the better Avengers book (Hardcover available here (http://dcbservice.com/product.aspx?id=5h&h=s&b=73#90295) for 50% off) once you get past the fact that it's an attempt to make a Marvel version of the Teen Titans (even though the tone of the book is different).

Ronin is Deadpool.

I back that up with absolutely nothing, except that he's using two swords in the one picture I've seen of him.

Most people are guessing Iron Fist, due to the color scheme, martial arts, and Luke Cage being on the team.  I don't really care who it is, I'm just don't understand why we had to hear about him over a year before he joins.

Deadpool would be a far more controversial choice.

In fact, it would be silly.  Completely out of character for Captain America to put any faith at all in someone like Deadpool.

Which is why they might do it.

FIFY

I have read #8. The fight with the Wrecker was decent, the best part of the series so far. Which isn't saying much, because it still feels like Bendis really doesn't give much of a shit about writing any kind of "traditional" superteam fights. It's all still that same "trying too hard to be hip and funny" dialogue that makes me want to stab Tarantino's eyes out with my cock. It's still totally wrong for the characters other than Luke Cage. The Iron Man-Wolverine exchange was ok, except... GODDAMNIT WOLVERINE CANNOT HAVE THIS MUCH FUCKING FREE TIME. HOLY SHIT, IT STRETCHES MY MIND TO THE POINT OF BREAKING.

Nothing they've said, written or done makes it anymore believable for me until he quits the X-Men.

The Sentry thing? Cute, but ultimately, I don't care about the character, his very existence contradicts the entire story that was done before, and did I mention it's cute? It's entirely too clever post-modern.

The thing about the Iron Man/Wolverine conversation that seemed off to me is that Wolverine doesn't need the Avengers to get him through dark times, nor is he really hurting for cash.  As far as good publicity after the Hydra brainwashing thing, the Avengers don't seem to get a free pass in the media.  Hell, according to what's been said about upcoming issues, they'll be taking some heat for having Spider-man on the team.  They went through problems with the media during Busiek's run partly because they had mutants on the team.  He's more likely to make the Avengers look bad than he is to look good working with them, especially if his main use is going to be killing.

Even with your dislike of the Punisher character..... 

I browsed through one of the Punisher collections from the new run,  and there's about 3 or 4 issues of the Punisher doing Wolvering dirty Ennis style.  Basically, Frank keeps maiming Wolverine to keep him out of the way.  So help me,  I enjoyed every minute of it.

Daredevil, Spider-man, and Wolverine are all teamed up to by the end of the run to get the Punisher.  And HE KEEPS OUTSMARTING THEM.  At this point, I stopped browsing through graphic novels again in disgust.

Exactly my point, and why I think they might actually have it be Deadpool.

Haven't read New Avengers #9 yet, but I didn't read Young Avengers #6, finishing up the first arc.  The one major flaw with the story is that time travel in the MU doesn't change history, it creates divergent timelines.  I'm not particularly a big continuity geek or anything, but it's the kind of thing that's been mentioned in dozens of stories.  Other than that, the story has been pretty fun though and it's brought back the Vision, leaving c-lister Scott Lang (the second Ant Man) as the only actual casualty of the Avengers so-called worst day ever.

Wait, they've brought back the Vision now?

My mind just went sproing.

Long story short if you don't have any intentions of reading the first arc of Young Avengers anytime soon:

Iron Lad is a young version of Kang.  In much the same way that Kang didn't want to eventually become Immortus, young Kang decided after meeting his future self that he didn't want to become some evil warlord and so went back in time to the present day MU and gathered a team to fight Kang.  Young Kang has a suit of armor like Kang's which he mentally changes to  look more like Iron Man's armor.  Upon arriving in the past, he found the boxes Vision's body was stored in and downloaded Visions mind into the armor, learning about Visions secret protocols to rebuild Avengers if need be recruiting from a pool of super-powered people who are associated (in most cases apparently unknowingly) with the Avengers.  When Kang goes back in time to stop his younger self from screwing up the timeline, young Kang ditches his armor so he can't be tracked, while the other Young Avengers fight off Kang.  During the battle, the discarded armor springs to life under Visions control (looking mostly like Iron Lad's armor but with a red and green color scheme).  Towards the end of the last issue, Vision is last seen with Cap and Iron Man, but I'm guessing he's not going to be shown in New Avengers.

I finally read New Avengers #9 and Young Avengers #6. YA was just a narrative mess. It was way too rushed, and I still am not sure what happened, especially in regards to the Vision. But hey, they got the first arc in at exactly 6 issues, graphic novel length. That storytelling pattern is really getting on my tits. It sometimes leads to really artificial feeling stories, especially in this case when it felt like the last issue was really rushed.

NA #9 just continues the Bendis brain-fucking. So the Sentry mini-series didn't really happen, only it sort of did, and some big baddy used Jason Wyngarde (Mastermind) to make the Sentry make up all that stuff that was in the Sentry mini-series, including the Void. Oh, and Professor Xavier just shows up with the X-Men here, even though he hasn't been shown to be anywhere but Genosha for months now, and hasn't even seen the X-Men before the Astonishing X-Men appearance he just had. The timeline for the Marvel Universe is just fucked right now, with people appearing all over the place at all sorts of inapporpriate times. I'm not even sure how they can call this an Avengers book, since the main characters portrayed are White Queen, Mr. Fantastic and the Sentry, who will apparently become an Avenger or something. The art was good though, with a distinctly more varies color palatte than the shit-brown and stuff's on fire orange of the first 6 or so issues.

Issue 10 ends the Sentry arc, and apparently gives the New Avengers a break for an issue while Emma Frost fixes everything after pages of dialogue so dull I had to skim the majority of it.  He then joins the Avengers who want him as a member partly so they can keep an eye on him.  He does this despite the fact that without Emma's help, they have the power to do exactly Jack Shit should the Sentry ever become a problem again.  Then we get the Sentry's HQ appearing on top of the Avengers building, and Tony making some comment about how he believes in what Cap was saying about fate.

All in all this was a pretty dull story arc that relegated the New Avengers into being ineffective guest stars in their own book.  Between this issue and House of M, Bendis really seems to show a fondness for Emma Frost's character.  Sadly, he's nowhere near as good at writing her as Morrison or Whedon.

Just read #10. TOTAL CRAP. I can't even begin to express how badly this book is being written. Everyone speaks with the same voice, and it just really sounds totally wrong. The whole Sentry story line is just fucking stupid. It was mildly clever as a mini-series, but it just gets even more stupid the more they try to integrate it into the Mavel Universe proper.

And Emma Frost was just written wrong. She talks about how she's going to undo the damage in Sentry's head and says that when she's done, "it'll feel like you just took the biggest dump of your life."

Emma Frost doesn't talk like that. Voices all wrong. They've spent 10 issues just trying to set the team up and not one issue has been worth it.

Did she really say? Wow...that is...lame.

I thought the Blue King City of Heroes comic had some awful lines, but nothing as bad as that.  I feel now that I've been overly critical of that comic.  I had previously said it was awful and of laughable quality.  Apparently, whether its quality was laughable or not, it was certainly of professional quality.

Excuse me for a min-rant, but IMO the big problem in big comics is the lack of proper editorial oversight. Writers come and go. It's the job of the editors to make sure characters stay consistent, storylines get dealt with, etc.

If they don't do that, you get shit like the X-Men where the Legay Virus is just dropped, character come and go, die, come back to life, mutate, swap powers for no reason... Each writer tends to have certain characters that interest them, certain storylines that interest them, etc. But in bigtime comics the characters are what is most important. Too many writers come in and make big changes just to suit them, then leave year later then the next guy comes in and does the same. A comic book title can live through dozens of writers. Unfortunately the editorial teams do horrible jobs.

I used to read the Marvel newsgroups a bit, it was amazing. There was one Marvel editor there who would post about things like Marvel employees stealing all the valuable back-issues and in general people being complete dumbasses.

The X-Men books have been HORRIBLE about that sort of things for years. Part of the problem was that when Bob Harras pretty much forced Chris Claremont off the books in the early 90's (in an effort to pander to the Image jerkoffs), all the subplots and minor characters that Claremont had had huge ass plans for over 15 years in the books were left open. So after a while of shuffleboard artists/writers, he had to close off some of the subplots, and just assigned it to whoever was on the book to do so. The books were just tossed around between either whoever was the new hotness (Nieciza, Lobdell) or whoever would take it, and consistency was just forgotten. I'd wager that just about all the major fuckups of the time before Morrison's run came from the editorial staff's minds and not the minds of the writers. The writers were just told "you must have a big 4 book crossover lasting 3 months" or "you must kill Colosuss." It wasn't until Morrison and Austen's runs on their respective books that any sort of consistent storyline was observed. Naturally, on Claremont's return, that was tossed in a blender and shot out at all different directions. Claremont's X-Men stories now are a shadow of their former selves.

I think I heard that Jim Lee in particular was one of the Image guys who kinda had the X-men line bending whichever way they wanted it.

Yes. He was the early impetus to shitcan Claremont, then he left after like 10 issues to form Image. I have not forgiven him since.

His Batman run recently was decent, his Superman run was just not.

I've now read #11. Their continual attempts to bring Daredevil into the book irk me. Even if his current identity situation was not as described in this book, he just never fit as an Avenger. I believe they are trying to make him a member by making him take up a second identity, the ninja mofo that is in this issue. If that's the case, it's worse stupidity than putting Wolverine in the book. Of course, their attempts to hide this Ninja's identity are a way to build tension. The art is well-done, but like the dialogue of the entire series, not consistent with the tonality needed for the Avengers.

Nothing in this issue fit in with the Avengers.  Ninja?  Cap worrying about Silver Samurai, simply because he's one of the guys that escaped from the Raft?  The Hand and Hydra don't strike me as a big threat to fucking Power Pack, let alone the Avengers.  Something tells me that Sentry is going to not be around for some reason any time the Avengers fight the ninja.  Cage alone could probably take all of them.  That Ronin is eventually taken down by them only confirms my suspicions that the Avengers newest member will be as useless as everyone but Cap and Iron Man seem to have been so far.

From what I remember of the Avengers from when I read years ago,  they ALWAYS had the problem of matching power levels of villains to individual Avengers.  In the same lineup,  you could have Wasp and Captain America who can demolish a bunch of guntotting goons,  and Thor or Hercules,  who could go toe to toe with the Hulk.

Obviously,  Thor versus the same goons or Wasp versus the Hulk is a little unbalanced....

I think I stopped when it was the bizarro-Avengers,  with Dr. Druid, the Black Knight, and a bunch of other not very memorable faces. Bleh.

From what I've heard, that's why Stan Lee got rid of everyone but Cap, and added Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver to the team.  It was hard for him to come up with threats for the whole group.  Herc is brash enough that he can manage to get himself into trouble, Thor is really the only one that I think is unbalancing on the team.  Sentry seems like he'd be even more powerful.

Having now read the Sentry #1, I just cannot stand this character. He's like Superman on uber ultimate nullifer steroids. He can just do everything, making everyone else on the team useless. And his only flaw is that he's also bugfuck insane and could destroy the universe. It's just way too fucking out there.

But I'd still rather he be an Avenger than Daredevil or Wolverine.

Ack,  Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are worse.  They both have the power types where, one second, goon is knocking them out by hitting them over the head.  The next second,  the Witch is hexing the Hulk so he has a heart attack,  or hexing away portions of Mephisto's soul so she can become pregnant by her android husband.....   Guess which one actually happened in Marvel continuity!

Don't want to harp on it,  since we discussed this a few threads down.

The overwhelmingly powerful hero can work,  but then it becomes character driven.  I think the Silver Surfer is a pretty good example of it.  More character driven,  with personal morality and codes of behavior.  The times they brought in someone more powerful than the Surfer usually sucked ass.

I have a feeling, though, that two page action spreads > angsty brooding and copious dialogue about fate, life and moral choices. 

Hmmm.....  I'd read something that had Cap arguing with Wolverine about the moral/ethical use of violence.  I have a feeling they'd go with the cleavage shot of Emma Frost instead, though....

It can work.  The problem is that it hasn't so far in New Avengers.  The fight against the Wrecker was the only time so far in 11 issues that team members other than Cap and Iron Man were actually given something to do.  Take away Iron Man and Sentry and you might have a decent Marvel Knights or Heroes for Hire team, but as New Avengers these guys have been going against 3rd-raters like Electro and Sauron, or people so far out of their league like the Sentry/the Void, that they had to get outside help and didn't actually do anything themselves.  Bendis really isn't suited to team books.  He's only making it harder on himself by trying to write one with a group of characters that have such a wide range of power levels.

And it's bad strategy.  Is Cap picking these people randomly or what?

It's fate.  Most of these guys showed up to the same fight one night.

So afterwards they all decided to get some 3am pancakes at Denny's and Cap said, "Hey, you guys know what I miss?  The Avengers.  Wanna make a new team?"

Unfortunately, the actual writing really wasn't much more inventive than that. I wager to say that would be more interesting than what happened.

ACTIVE SG "THE AVENGERS" RECRUITING PST, NO LVL REQ, UNIFORM OPTIONAL, ALL ORIGINS

Just read Avengers #13, and yes, the identity of "Ronin" was about as transparent for anyone who's read Daredevil under Bendis as you can get. No, it's not Daredevil. The use of the character they chose is, shall we say, just a wee bit silly. The fact that Ronin needs Captain America to translate what Iron Man says (you'll understand why if you know the character) just makes a bad dialogue exchange worse. Spider-Man even mentions in this episode that if the Sentry were there, this would be wrapped up in two seconds.

Maybe that's a hint that perhaps the Sentry shouldn't be used. At all.

Sigh.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8f/NEWAVN011_cov.jpg/400px-NEWAVN011_cov.jpg)

That is not a chick.

It's just not.

Sorry, Marvel.  You lose.

The reveal of who Ronin is wasn't even the worst of this issue for me.  After over a year of being on the covers, I stopped caring who Ronin was well before the arc even started. 

The shit that bothered me:

Iron Man once again making everyone else look pretty useless

"Humorous" lines like "I'm pooping in my tights"

2 page spread of Spiderwoman:  She's lookin at the hatch, she's lookin at Viper, she's lookin at Jarvis, she's thinking about the hatch again, she see's the override button, checkin out Viper again, now she's looking at Cap, looking at the hatch again, there's the override button again, ect for 27 panels...

Why is Jarvis on the Quinjet to begin with?  Does Stark always bring the butler along on out-of-country missions?

So now Iron Man wants to make an announcment to the media that they've reformed the Avengers.  You'd think the Quinjet flying in and out of the tower, and the Sentry's HQ suddenly appearing on top of it announcement enough.

Besides the gender bending look, it just doesn't make sense for Echo to be involved. Or, for that matter, for her to put on some costume which I don't even remember her doing much when she tried to kill Daredevil. Like Spider-Man or Daredevil, the character just DOES NOT WORK in that environment.

And yeah, the Iron Man thing is getting silly. First, ninjas kick their ass, now ninjas can do fuckall because they are in the open. WTF?

The whole Spider-Woman is working for Viper is working for ... storyline never worked for me. I think I'm reading this book just to keep bitching about it.

I used to read X-Men all the time, but stopped when I started running out of money. I do remember the Legacy Virus though. I also remember that Mastermind was killed by it as was Pyro.

Anyone wanna explain how they brought him back?

Mastermind fucked with Sentry's head sometime in the past.

And that's how you retcon a character into existence.

Issue 14 is pretty much just a Spider-woman flashback.  Lots of talking, pointless Secret War tie-in which adds nothing to the story, and the jaw-dropping cliffhanger of the New Avengers putting together a press conference to announce... well, the forming of the New Avengers.

You see, apparently the media in New York in the Marvel Universe works a little slowly.  It apparently took them a little while to catch on to the fact that the Quinjet takes off from the top of the building and  that the X-men even landed on the roof in their jet in the first issue of House of M.  Apparently what finally tipped them off was the Sentry's large glowing HQ appearing over Stark Tower.  Of course from the time that happened, the New Avengers still managed to go off and have an adventure in Japan and come back before the new stations started running the story.

Issue #14 was a bit better than some of the others, but only because it was ALL TALK. I like the Spider-Woman character, I always have. But having read the last issue of Secret War and now the tie-in with this... UGH. Secret War FUCKING SUCKED. It sucked hard. I'm not saying Fury wouldn't have done what he did, he just wouldn't have done it with the characters they chose. I mean... DAREDEVIL? For an assassination mission in another country? Matt Murdock would have told him to go fuck himself, it didn't have anythign to do with Hell's Kitchen. About the only way Fury would have gotten most of those charcters to go is if he'd have told them about the attack on New York. And they still wouldn't have done an assassination mission.

Spider-Woman is a stronger character than they are writing her, though. She's essentially letting herself be a milksop pawn and is happy about it or something.

The whole 'Sentry's HQ just APPEARED!' thing should worry the shit out of the Avengers, since he can, you know, CLOAK THE FUCKING THING UNLESS HE'S GONE OFF HIS ROCKER AGAIN. Which, upon reading the lastest issue of his book, he has. But all they are worried about is a press conference.

I could condense the entire 14-issue run of New Avengers into like 3 or 4 issues. It's horribly padded out.

I actually looked at a comic book the other day, Iron Man was talking to Silver Samurai then he nuked hella ninjas it was cool because Iron Man is cool.  But for some reason Spider Man and Capt. America and some other randoms were hanging around.  I never understood what the fuck Iron Man worked with a team for.  Esp when clearly he can nuke ninjas by himself just fine.

In that issue, the team asked him the same question.

And?

I was in a game store so I couldn't exactly take my time to read the dialogue although I swear spider man said he pooped his pants but I can't be certain.  Either way the only thing more stupid then that was when I picked up an issue of the New Avengers and read the explination of why there was an iron man who isn't iron man calling himself like iron kid or something I almost cried.

I miss Sleepwalker, did they discontinue that series?

That was an issue of Young Avengers, not New Avengers.  Iron Lad was a teenage version of Kang.

Fuck Kang.

He's the fucking answer whenever Avengers books get stalled or confused.  Surprise!  It's KANG!`~~~!!!  Frome alternate universe 12,934,242!

Sometime in the late 80's I stopped collecting comics by characters and started following writers/artists I liked. So to those who've been following their fave characters since the 80's-early 90's: is it possible that comics suck more now than in the 90s? :p

I imagine it would depend on what characters someone is following.  Looking at sales numbers though very few fans seem to follow particular characters.  Numbers rise and fall on a book largely due to the creative team being put on it, and how much hype the book gets.  Aside from Amazing Spider-man, X-Men, and Uncanny X-Men, I'd be hard pressed to think of very many comics that fans pick up regardless of those two factors.

I also stopped in the early-mid 90s. Things can't be worse now than then - it's impossible.

I agree. Around 94-95 I'd completely lost all interest in comics. Velorath pulled me back in with about 12 titles, but I picked them up in bulk and blew through them. Basically, it seems like the gaming market. 1,000 titles or someshit come out every year and maybe 15 of those are must play. Weak. But I still play them all because I don't have anything else to do. I don't understand how these supposedly creative people sit and make a game or comic or whatever that's total shit and not shoot themselves.

There is a fuckton of crappy comics to wade through these days to get the good stuff, and unsurprisingly most of the good shit you find is going to be written by the same authors who've been writing good shit for years.  If you like Grant Morrison's stuff, chances are you'll love We3.  If you like Ellis, you'll probably like Down, Fell, and from the looks of it Nextwave.  Busiek fans will like Astro City: Dark Ages, his run on Conan, and probably Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis.  Stan Saki continues to write good Usagi Yojimbo tales.  Brubaker, Vaughn, Dan Slott, and Peter David, are all writing great stuff right now. 

I'm sure there's a lot of good Indy shit out there I haven't yet stumbled upon either.  I try to pick up at least a few comics a month from writers I'm not really familiar with.   Part of the problem though is that comics journalism is even more of a joke than video game journalism.  There are very few places to get good reviews these days.  Newsarama and Wizard both suck Marvel's dick.  Aintitcool's comic reviews often don't even contain reviews of the comics so much as 5 paragraphs of the writer rambling about unrelated craps.  I've mentioned more than once my love for Paul O'Brien's reviews on thexaxis.com, but his focus is mostly on X-books.

So how do you find the good comics other than just following your favorite writers?  When comics cost $3 bucks each these days it's hard for some people to pick up new books.  I'll be honest downloading shit helps a lot, but you still have to have a general idea of what you're looking for when you're doing that.

New Avengers #15:

Ms. Marvel's Blog... crap storytelling device with painfully small type.  Besides that, the large amount of focus on Ms. Marvel this issue once again shows that Bendis doesn't seem to have any clue how to handle the actual cast of the book.  And I realize the red line crossing out House of M each time Ms. Marvel said it in conversation with Cap was supposed to represent her leaving those words out of the Blog, but in practice it reminds me of how silly it is for the heroes to actually refer to the events as "the House of M".  House of M was the name of the story.  There's no real reason any of the characters should use the name, and every time someone says it it feels like an advertisement for the story.  I'm surprised they don't just slip the release date for the TPB in there too. 

And what the fuck ever happened to "show, don't tell" when it comes to writing?  In House of M, Ms. Marvel barely has any "screen time".  Now in NA #15 we get a page long monologue about how much HoM affected her.  Bendis, trying to shoehorn in shit like this after the fact doesn't make it feel like HoM had a bunch of ramifications.

JJJ stabbing the Avengers in the back was about the only part of the story I liked.  The Spider-woman shit is already boring me.  We realize she's a double agent.  Reminding us once again at the end of this issue doesn't make for any sort of shocking ending.

The art was okay, but this guy can't draw a good Cap.  He looks like he's about 17 in this issue.  Also for some reason when I was flipping back through the book, I noticed that apparently Jessica Jones' preganancy has caused her breasts to double in size.  In one of the last pages they stick out further than her stomach and look like they're larger than Jarvis' head.

Sentry gets one line this issue and doesn't even get to finish it.  Ronin for whatever reason doesn't even show up.

Ronin doesn't show up because really, she's only there for that one story. I am quite sure Bendis will forget she's there just like he does with Sentry.

The Spider-Woman arc doesn't bother me, per se, but really it needs to come to some resolution. But there hasn't been much of any kind of resolution at all in this book so far, why should he start now? I agree with everything you said, especially about the blog thing. I just scoffed at the entire concept. I mean, wasn't Ms. Marvel Sec. of Defense for a week or some shit? Why would she have a fucking blog? And I don't even remember her BEING in House of M, yet it's some kind of big turning point in her life? If it wasn't for the fact that I really dig her character and Spider-Woman, I'd think their presence was ridiculous. Only, their really more interesting than everyone else in the book, except for Luke Cage, who is only there to be Samuel Jackson.

It's like Bendis took the worst aspects of Claremont's X-men and applied them to the Avengers.

Just read #16. Is there something in Bendis' contract that stipulates he has to put out issues that have absolutely no actual Avengers content in this book? I mean there were six fucking pages of 1 panel splashes of something/someone crashing into Alaska from space. There is one conversation between the new Shield director and Tony Stark, and the rest is the Shield people reacting to the splash down. Badly. In really confusing, two-page spreads.

Where the fuck are the Avengers? I've never seen someone waste so much page count on fucking nothing. He is a better writer than this.

He's also got everyone in an uproar about the apparent death of Alpha Flight.  Quickly killing off old characters off-panel in order to make his new villain  look like a threat isn't exactly great writing (I assume this is The Collective we're seeing.  That thing made up of all the energy of former mutants).

This book should just be called Marvel Universe.  It's main purpose seems to be keeping all the big Events tied together.  Every storyline that has been started in this book that actually involves the Avengers seems to get dropped.  S.H.I.E.L.D. secretly holding villains?  No progress made on that one.  Sentry and Ronin?  One's had a handful of lines since his arc, and the other hasn't appeared at all since hers.  Spiderwoman's story is moving along at a crawl.  16 issues in and we haven't had one arc that's felt like a complete story.

From one of Marvel's panels at NYCC: (http://www.newsarama.com/NYCC/Marvel/CivilWar/report.htm)


So now after taking almost a year and a half to actually establish the team, Bendis wants to completely change the book again.  This shit is all build-up and no payoff.  It takes 15 issues to make the team "official", and now they'll pretty much only have enough time to beat some new throwaway villain created by that House of M shit before the team is broken down again.

Wow.

New Avengers SHOULD be renamed to "Marvel Universe." It pretty much has fuckall to do with the actual Avengers, since in most issues it's just posturing, talking and occasionally Iron Man shoots someone with repulsors or something. Most of the time it's about establishing other characters that have their own series. The best part in the entire 16-issue run so far was when the non-Avenger Avengers (everyone but Captain America) fought the Wrecking Crew guy. Everything else has been shitty shit shit shit.

New Avengers: Disassembled? WHAT THE FUCK? How about writing stories about the actual Avengers? I mean do they actually DO ANYTHING? There's been more Avengers in Spider-Man's The Other runs than in the entirety of the Avengers books. It isn't like Bendis hasn't had the room. Christ, he's not only had 16 issues of their book, he's had a 7-issue mini-series as well.

From what Bendis has shown us the only two people you actually need in the Avengers are Dr Strange and the Iron Man armour, which can be voice activated by Dr Strange. God knows what the rest do

It's also funny that the New Avengers guest appearances in Runaways and New Thunderbolts weren't too flattering.  Doesn't seem like anyone is really buying these guys as a team.

I'd buy them as a team if they actually acted like a team. Have Ronin and the Sentry actually met yet? They've had their arses felt by the wrecking crew guy, gotten captured and nekkid-ified in the savage land, got beaten up by the sentry/void ( wasnt it emma frost and dr strange that calmed him down?) then had a woman (with more muscles than a rob leifield Cable pinup) help them get owned by some ninjas. As a team they are woeful. Now it looks like the team is going to be split down the middle during Civil War.

Can't we just scrap the whole idea?

No. Apparently dysfunction and 6 pages of splashes sell well. My supervisor at work loves the new team.

I don't get it.

I assume it's the same mentality that causes people to insist they had fun playing SWG.

I accidently watched the House of M universe Avengers animated movie, that was the worst crap I've ever seen.  Alternate universes suck.  Thor + Iron Man = what are they going to fight on a day to day basis?  Gods?

Oh and the Avengers are a stupid team except for when they were basically just a military arm of Stark Enterprises (no fucking Captain America, that just does not make any sense).  I'm thinking the team back when it was Iron Man, Warmachine, Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch.  That at least made some degree of sense, I think Vision was on the team too?

But no matter what the whole Iron Man on a team thing has pissed me off, he's fucking Iron Man and he doesn't need any stupid help.  Whenever they put him in a team setting he becomes 1/3rd of the hero he is when he is in a solo book.  Its just stupid and annoying.

Someone PM me though when they make a good solo book for any of the following people:

Punisher
Iron Man
Darkhawk (does he still exist lol)
Sleepwalker (I'm sure he doesn't exist anymore)

Those were the only people who ever held my interest in the marvel universe.

That Avengers movie was actually the Ultimates version, which has nothing to do with HoM.  For it doesn't really have much to do with the Ultimates either as from what I've heard the characters look like the Ultimate versions and there's some plot similarities, but it's completely watered down for kids which misses the whole point of the Ultimates.

Punisher has had some pretty decent stuff written recently if you like Garth Ennis.  He did more of a humorous run first, then shifted over to a more realistic style when the book shifted to the MAX (Marvel's Mature Readers stuff) imprint.

Iron Man has been pretty inconsistant over the years.  No real great stories you're missing though.

Darkhawk shows up from time to time, most recently in the first arc of Runaways vol. 2 as part of a group of former teen heroes.

Sleepwalker I think was recently used in Kirkman's Marvel Team-up book as part of group of lesser known characters but I think it's an alternate future story or somesuch.

"Welcome Back, Frank" and the next graphic novel or two weren't bad for the Punisher.  I liked it despite Ennis.  I glanced through some of the later stuff and it had devolved a bit into typical Ennis.  Ennis always pushes a character's quirks further and further into the extreme until you forgot why the quirk was entertaining in the first place. 

That had pretty much happened to the Soap character in Punisher when I stopped my browsing.

The Punisher fucking with Wolverine pretty hard was worth the "meh" storyline towards the end....

I'll browse some graphic novels now,  but really I find none of it worth anywhere near the price tag.  Especially when I just had to order a copy of Bonehunters to be shipped from England.

Just to add one more thing, check out Ennis' two Punisher one-shots.  Punisher:  The End is about Castle taking on one last mission after surviving through a nuclear war.  Much better than the premise would have you believe.  The other one-shot is Punisher:  The Cell, which has Castle getting himself thrown in prision in order to kill a particular group of inmates.  Both are MAX style Punisher books rather than the funny shit.

Read issue #17 a week ago but didn't really have a lot to say about it at the time since the plot only inches forward a little.  Cage has some ideas about new things for the team to do in its spare time, which might be interesting except we now the team as it is won't be around much longer and we know that this will probably never be referred to again anyway.  We also see Cap yell at Sentry for help which would be understandable except for that fact that Cap knows this guy has serious mental problems.  Not exactly Cap's finest moment.

And so once again it's up to Iron Man to do everything (Wolverine tries calling the X-men, but either they don't have Caller ID, or the Avengers have a blocked number as Wolvie states that since the House of M, they aren't really answering their phone much anymore).  They do manage to get hold of Ms. Marvel (starring in her own mini, from the pages of New Avengers and House of M!  Issue #1 on sale now at comic shops everywhere) who decides to come in swinging at the Collective with Iron Man is talking to him.  One can only assume that she couldn't stand the thought of issue #18 consisting of 24 pages of Iron Man and the Collective talking in Bendis-speak while the artist repeats the same headshot panels 3 times a page.

The Illuminati special is also out now.  The writing itself wasn't bad, but this is a pretty big retcon they're trying to shoe-horn in and it doesn't work for way too many reasons to even get into here.  The end result is a grouping of some of the MU's most intelligent characters that comes across as completely ineffective at the best of times, and unheroic, manipulative, and making world changing decisions in what would seem to be the space of a few minutes at the worst of times.

The only character they got right in Illuminati was Namor. Everyone else? Completely wrong. The whole thing is ridiculous. Shooting the Hulk out into space? WHAT? I had heard about that a while ago, but it doesn't make any sense. Essentially, instead of doing what they are talking about (dealing with the Hulk problem) they just foist him off onto another planet, in essence saying "It's that planet's problem."

I'm really not buying it. And I like Alex Maleev's art, but this is not his strong suit, just like it's not Bendis's strong suit.

The New Avengers issue might be good, if anything actually happened. But of course, it's 20-something pages of talking followed by a splash page of action. The whole deal with going to Detroit? Yeah, it'll be forgotten forever in a month. This issue totally highlighted what was wrong with putting the Sentry in the Avengers. He has yet to actually take part in ANY of the Avengers' deals, except for House of M, where he stood in the background instead of doing something useful like taking away the Scarlet Witch's powers. It isn't like he doesn't have almost the exact same "reality-altering" powers.

When reading the Illuminati book, you can almost picture Quesada, Bendis, and company sitting around the table talking instead of the characters.  That's one of the Bendis' biggest flaws and it shows through in full force here.  His characters speak in his and Quesada's voices rather than their own.  Read their interviews and articles and you hear a lot of almost exactly the same dialogue.

And I think "futurist" Iron Man is just reading the description off the back of the eventual Civil War tpb in his little speech.

I just bought the hardback of "Secret War" written by Bendis, even though I'd never before read it, because the art looked incredible.

The art was incredible the whole way through.

What's the big deal about this Bendis guy?  He has heroes constantly breaking character for the sake of not-very-good gags.  Why is he so big? He's not all that good.

He was good before he started doing superheroes. AKA Goldfish, Jinx and Torso are all great series. Even his early Daredevil stuff was good, before he outed DD as Matt Murdock. From then on, it's seemed like he's written one long series of "SHOCKING MOMENTS!" after another, spaced around self-deprecating gags that only fit Spider-Man's character.

"Listen, you new goblin-themed villain... I don't know if you know your goblin-themed history... but your outfit is in really bad taste.  And oh, sweet God, I hope there's not an Osborn under that mask, I really can't handle any more Osborns."

I mean, I don't know Spidey all that well, but that doesn't seem like the kind of thing he'd joke about.  That sounds more like a comic fan making a joke and then making Spider-Man say it in the first person.

Also, he has a line about:
"I'm three days away from you finding me running around Times Square in nothing but my web-shooters and my mask whooping it up about power and responsibility."

Spider-Man certainly is self-aware these days, isn't he?

Christ, are those actual quotes?  That sounds like parody, not actual dialogue. 

Glad to see the franchises have been handled so well since I had to stop reading them years ago.  /green

Some of Bendis' gags are funny, and he actually does handle some characters well. Like Spider-Man. It's just when he really gets cranked up, EVERYONE sounds the exact same, as if he's narrating the story in one voice.

My thoughts exactly.

And yes, verbatim quotes.  Was reading 'em out of the book as I was typing them.

It's not just writing in one voice, which I've noticed as well but isn't bothering me so much- it's that he breaks the fourth wall for the sake of some of these gags.  That's when you cross the line from humorous to parody.

He obviously needs an editor to take a firm hand or something.  I know he can do pretty good work, like the previously mentioned AKA Goldfish.  And while flippant remarks or silliness may fit with Spiderman to a degree (though again, not those quotes you posted) they don't fit many other characters, but from what I've read, he does it with just about all of them.  I just can't fathom how that stuff, or just about any of the stuff Marvel is doing these days, seems like a good idea to anyone there. 

Oh well, I just pick up collected stuff anyways anymore, so I just know what to skip in the future. 

The plot inches forward a little bit with issue 18, as the characters learn at the end of the issue what readers have been aware of for months now:  The Collective is made up of the energy from the depowered mutants.  Sentry finally sees some action this issue and... well to be honest doesn't really seem to last any longer in a fight with the Collective than Ms. Marvel did.  Bendis also manages to drag in another one of his characters into the book.  This time it's Agent Johnson from Secret War.  No, I didn't read it either.

Anyway, big fight scene and apparently Iron Man's idea of using Spider-man's brains instead of his powers to fight the Collective just involves using the Vision to access Avengers files.  Way to go Spidey!  At least he gets something to do though.  Wolverine, Spider-woman, and Luke Cage might as well be back at the Tower helping Jarvis clean or something.

Agent Johnson is brought in and does nothing. The Young Avengers are apparently living in the Avengers tower. I'm getting real tired of the Avengers threatening to arrest the Young Avengers every time they see them; it just makes no sense.

The whole Collective thing? Stupid. Iron Man calls the whole team together just to make a joke about how he'd like it if they could talk nice about him after he's gone? The Collective is an over-energized postal worker?

Bleah.

Issue 19 in Bendis' experiment in making Iron Man look like the most powerful hero in the Marvel Universe while making everyone else look incompetent.  That and plugging House of M.  Yes that's right.  House. Of. M.  Missed it the first two times?  That's House... of... M.  It's actually repeated 6 times in the book but I couldn't bring myself to type it out three more times to make a point.  It's fucking stupid.  It would be like if the X-men actually used the phrase "The Phoenix Saga" when talking about those events, or "hey Spider-man, remember that whole Kraven's Last Hunt:  Fearful Symmetry thing?"

And Iron Man... fucking Iron Man.  This guy is going toe to toe with someone who is supposed to have the powers of thousands of mutants?  He can actually stop the Collective for a moment because he was "able to deconstruct the primary engery fields he's using based on old files of Magneto and Company and process an energy field that can counteract it."

Even for superhero books, that level of writing is unacceptable.  That kind of shit gives Iron Man of level of power and undefinable abilities that would make even Dr. Strange jealous.  From now on Iron Man should be able to beat any villain by pulling up files on them and coming up with some kinda shit to counteract them.  Presumably the only reason Iron Man can't put the Collective down for the count is that he doesn't have every depowered mutant's energy on file.  Of course for all that power and ability he's still stupid enough to put Spider-man on SHIELD's helicarrier despite the fact that he doesn't trust SHIELD, nor the army of psycics they apparently have on board.  Spider-man's comment of "some futurist" I'm sure was Bendis poking a bit of fun at himself, but really it ends up being a sad reminder that the characters are just here to dance on Bendis' strings to get the story from point A to point B regardless of consistency or logic.

Now maybe this is all a setup by Iron Man to give SHIELD information that was being witheld.  After all, Iron Man is shown in the Illuminati special to support the Registration Act and that presumably takes place before this issue (as the act was still secret at the time).  On the other hand, Illuminati has yet to really be referenced by any other book and from what I've heard a recent issue of Iron Man actually has him against the act at first.  So in that respect I find it a little hard to have any sort of faith that this is actually woven into story.  Bendis' idea of continuity right now seems to involve dragging one of his characters in from Secret War for a page in the previous issue and then promptly forgetting about her.

Finally we reach the end of the book, where one of the SHIELD agents tells Iron Man and Sentry to stop fighting the Collective so he can go about his way to wherever he was heading.  As soon as the break off the attack the Collective flies off to Genosha (they mention he might possibly be looking for Scarlet Witch).  Now while I'm overwhelmed by the fact that this story might actually be advancing I have to ask... if he was heading for Genosha all this time and was only distracted when people attacked him, what the fuck brought him to New York in the first place?  Did it just happen to be directly in his path?  Most of the other New Avengers as usual don't get to do shit by the way.

Yeah, unfortunately I agree with everything you said. Let's not forget that when Wanda was last seen, it was nowwhere near Genosha. In fact, it looked more like the villages of Eastern Europe than anything in Genosha.

The Avengers referring to it as "House of M" is really just stupid. I mean, really stupid, because they never referred to it as that in the story, or even as the House of M, more like the House of Magnus. It's a title that wasn't really even any good for the series itself.

I got the same vibe off the Iron Man thing. Although, the Shield chick did mention the registration act at least once or twice, so it is referenced. But it has as much to do with the story as the price of tea in China. The only other Avenger besides Iron Man or Sentry who does anything is Luke Cage, and all he does is break down a door. I seriously can't see why this book even has other characters. It has Spider-Man to quip, Captain America as some kind of a moralizer, Spider-Woman provides friction (and her whole arc is just retarded), and Iron Man does all the work. Oh yes, and Wolverine gets to act badass while doing nothing. I really can't see why anyone likes this book, and yet my friend swears by it.

I could pretty much sum up issue 20 by cutting and pasting previous comments I've made about the series here.  Pretty much everything that was wrong with the previous issues is still wrong here.  Except of course, this time around Bendis had the inspired idea of adding Xorn to plotline, allowing it to hit new lows.  Bravo.

I...thought Xorn didn't really exist?   It was Magneto who wasn't really Magneto?  Are you telling me that Xorn, who was Magneto who wasn't really Magneto, wasn't really Xorn?

Fuck if I know.

But if he wasn't really Xorn and wasn't really Magneto...

who the fuck was he?!

(http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlLA/original/exploding-head-thumb.jpg)

Right after Morrison left the X-Men and it was Claremont and Austen writing the two main books, Xorn was found in a monastery in China, having difficulty. He was brought back to the mansion, and promptly forgotten about once they changed writers. There was no explanation as to who he was or who the Magneto/Xorn, who apparently wasn't really Magneto either, was.

Really, the character is a blackhole of lost plot threads that no one seems willing to unfuck. I haven't read this issue of Avengers, but I'm sure it sucked if they bring Xorn into it.

Quesada explains the Xorn situation: (http://www.newsarama.com/NewJoeFridays/NewJoeFridays03.html)


Look... sometimes it's ok to just let plotlines get forgotten, especially when they suck.  They used to do it all the time in the X-books.  Did anyone at Marvel involved with this ever stop and look at what they were doing and say "you know, this shit really isn't making for a good story."

I can understand wanting to build on some of the stuff Morrison did during his run, but really Xorn only worked in the context of Morrison's stories.  His run has a certain kind of feel to it that makes it strange to take elements out of it and put them in the greater MU.  Even the use of Cassandra Nova in Astonishing X-men feels a little off to me, but all this shit with Xorn is so much worse because it doesn't make for a compelling story in any way, shape, or form.  Here especially it stands out as a direct response to people on the Internet asking Quesada if there will ever be an explanation of the Magneto/Xorn stuff.  Beyond that, it's completely out of place here and I have to imagine there are a lot of New Avengers readers out there are wondering who the fuck Xorn is, because it certainly doesn't get any sort of meaningful explanation in the story itself.

This is the textbook definition of continuity used poorly.  It's a somewhat obscure plot-thread from a completely different book being wrapped up in the last issue of a four-part story without explaining to the readers in the pages of said four-part story any of the important details that would allow them to understand what's going on.

I"m going to stick this here, since I don't want to rez any threads:

House of M graphic novels are out.  I decided to read a bunch of them on my lunch hour.  Most of my impressions on that follow are from when I regularly read comics around '90,  so feel free to correct me if I'm way out of date.

Fuck Wolverine.  Fuck him.

The point of the Avengers is that these people arent the baddest or toughest superheroes around:  it's the fact they're Heros.  With all the righteousness and aversion to moral ambiguity that entails.  There's a reason why Cap America (with all his outdated and prissy bullshit) is more often than not their leader:

They draw lines in the sand,  and make stands for unfightable absolutes.  In that way,  they're like the ACLU.  Most people on both the right and the left just want the ACLU to disappear sometimes so we can go ahead and make the moral/ethical compromises that allow society to work.

The one part of the books that got that right was Quicksilver & Wanda saying how important being an Avenger was to them, because it made them HEROS. 

Tony Stark/Iron Man is almost always an Avenger because he has such problems with ethics/morals.  He wants to be a better person,  but then he ends up drinking, or screwing aroudn with friends wives.  He NEEDS to be around people like Cap so he doesn't completely lose his way.

Spider-man actually has potential for the Avengers.  He has that overdeveloped moral sense/societal burden going for him.  He's willing to shoulder it.

He shouldn't be a punching bag to boost Wolverine's fucking self-esteem.

The rest of the team struck me as kind of "meh".  But that's okay, if you have a couple strong lead characters.  Typically, the Avengers used to be chock full of blah characters so that the two or three interesting characters had someone to play off of.

I'm not sure I even want to know how Ms. Marvel got brought back.  Didn't Rogue kill her and drain her powers by accident?  Or something? 

Next lunch hour,  I'm going to try and find that Punisher graphic novel where he spends the whole time shooting and maiming Wolverine to keep the idiot out of Frank's hair.

I hate that guy.

___________________________________

As for the rest of House of M....

The X writers have always had a problem balancing the "mutant hate as racism/sexism/homophobie allegory" with the way they go about writing.  The writers constantly introduce new and superpowerful mutants that then hang around in the background. 

Realistically, you either have to drop the allegory (comics don't change premises, so this is impossible) or have a purge of all the super powerful mutants.  If you didn't get rid of a bunch of the mutants,  they could have taken over the US by this point.

I read basically around the time where the Marauders and others had that whole business in the Morlock tunnels.  House of M clears out the superpowered again.  Look for the next purge in 15 years,  when some mucky-muck at Marvel realizes the vast amount of mutant secondary characters running around.

Dear Fucking God, that's awful. That's just a goddamned travesty. Of course, it isn't like Xorn wasn't horribly misused after the Morrison run, but to put this kind of explanation forward is just criminal. I've yet to read Avengers #20, but if it's as you say it is, that's awful, especially when you consider how badly the X-Men are being written nowadays.

The Cassandra Nova stuff in Astonishing isn't making much sense either.

I picked up some X-Men comics recently.  The whole Apocalypse arc.  Sunfire becomes Famine, Gambit becomes Death, how could this NOT be cool?  It's a hole in one.

Well, it's not cool.  The writing is not quite as bad as Ben Raab writing,  but it's up there.

The art is pretty good for the most part (don't like what he did with Rogue, but oh well, I don't like Rogue anyways) but the writing just brings the whole book down.  People do inexplicable acts without motivation.  The whole thing feels extremely rushed, like they either didn't have time to make it make sense or they didn't know how to make it make sense so they figured they'd make it FAST.

No, that's not it. Peter Milligan is a good writer, but you wouldn't know it from any of the X-Men stuff he's written. It's all been awful, just craptcaularly bad. No one acts within character, and they just do things for no reason whatsoever.

The whole Apocalypse thing? How could it not be cool? Because Apocalypse has always been a terrible character. I've never liked him, and the whole "turn X-Men into horseman" thing has been a crutch for writers whose pet characters have lost all fan interest. Angel, now Gambit and Sunfire. Total shit. How writers can't find something interesting to do with Sunfire is beyond me.

I have now read issue #20.

This story was about 20 kinds of bad wrongness. How did Mike Deodato's art descend into such lumpy shit? How can any of the Marvel writers involved in the Xorn or Magneto stuff ever look themselves in the face again? It's almost as if the Marvel folks just do not want to acknowledge the Morrison era of X-Men at all, unless it is to deride the work, shit on the characters and make a mockery of the entire run. The fact that it doesn't even really EXPLAIN the whole Xorn thing which Quesada's quote illuminated above is just atrocious.

In the X-Books in particular there is a whole lot of "let's totally disregard what this last guy did on the book - I'll kill off x,y and z and bring back a,b and c". The editors are to blame there.

As far as this Apoc stuff goes, didn't they just do that a little while ago, having X-Men serve as his horsemen?

Kinda.  If I remember right, they had Wolverine as a horseman but it ended up really being a Skrull or somesuch.

Wolverine and Angel have both been Death.

Caliban, who was sort of a member of the X-Men, was once Death and, later, Pestilence.

Aside from that, no it hasn't been done.  And the Angel & Caliban thing was a long time ago.

What they have done, though, is display who could have been what in several alternate realities.  Recently, for instance, Nicieza briefly showed an alternate reality in which Cable became War.

So X-people who've been horsemen, by horseman-

Death: Angel, Wolverine, Gambit, Caliban
Pestilence: Polaris, Caliban
Famine: Sunfire
War: None (though the Hulk was once War)

I don't think Apocalypse as a character is incredibly interesting, but as a device he works really well.  When he's treated more as a force of nature than as an individual, we see how other characters react to him and some interesting stories can be told.  But I don't need to hear about Apocalypse's tortured love life.

Xorn:  "You know who we are.  SAY IT!!  SAY OUR NAME!!"

God that reads like bad porn dialogue.

Y'know... I think I could write comic books.

I wouldn't be a Morrison, Moore or Ellis, but fuck I'd be at least as good as that Bendis hack.

I think I just called myself a hack.

With the bad taste of issue 20 still in my mouth, issue 21 is now on stands with the added bonus of being a Civil War tie-in and the first part of New Avengers Disassembled.  What this means in practice is we get a book taking place before Civil War #2 so it doesn't really advance any storylines beyond what we've already seen.  Technically I guess those interested in a Civil War tie-in might feel like the story is taking a step back.  Taken as an issue of New Avengers this issue focuses on Cap and thus ends up reading like a 2nd rate Captain America book for people already reading Brubaker's stuff.  Working with the setup provided over in the main Civil War series we get a very much out of character Henry Pym.  No motivation is given for him being on the pro-registration side, but then again Cap's motivation seems to have something to do with protecting the freedom for American Superheroes to dole out anonymous vigilante justice.  But it all gives Cap and Falcon an excuse to fight against Pym and SHIELD agents which I suppose is more or less the reason Civil War exists in the first place.

It doesn't hit the depths of the Collective arc (or even the Ronin and Sentry arcs for that matter), so I guess that's something at least.

Just read #21. I used to love Chaykin's work, but lately his stuff just leaves me cold. All the men have lantern jaws you could shelve a beer on. If Falcon wasn't colored brown and have a beard, he and Cap would be indistinguishable from Henry Pym. Of course, the writing is routinely awful. I think Bendis wants to do Dark Knight Returns again, only with Captain America. Or redo Watchmen with Marvel characters. I suppoe we'll have 5 or 6 with Cap recruiting the heroes he has in CW #2 individually. So 5 or 6 issues of waste of space, like the rest of the series.

If I remember correctly each issue of New Avengers Disassembled is supposed to focus on a different character.  They've mentioned who is the focus of each issue but other than Luke Cage being next I forget who and in what order.